A dapper dresser, an Elaine's regular, a lover of women, John O'Neill was one of the few people who could have understood exactly what was happening to him when he died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. O'Neill, an ex-FBI counter-terrorism agent, had made a career out of making a case against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Yet, as MURRAY WEISS reports in "The Man Who Warned America," to be published Thursday, he was frustrated again and again in his efforts to fight the terrorist organization around the world. Here is John O'Neill's story.

JOHN O'Neill, the new FBI section chief for counter-terrorism, spent the night of March 8, 1995, studying a rambling communiqué from a little-known Saudi expatriate named Osama bin Laden.

At the time, U.S. terrorism experts believed the biggest threats were Hezbollah and Hamas, not something called al Qaeda.

A few days after he read bin Laden's angry denunciation of the Saudi royal family for allowing U.S. military bases in their country, O'Neill arrived at a meeting with FBI Deputy Director Robert "Bear" Bryant armed with a developing belief that bin Laden was in fact the world's most pressing threat.

Bryant was impressed.

"The first time I ever heard of bin Laden was from John O'Neill," he recalled. ONeill also began discussing bin Laden with Richard Clarke, the national coordinator for counter-terrorism.

O'Neill compared bin Laden to a young Adolf Hitler, making ominous threats that no one took seriously.

"It's like 'Mein Kampf,' he said. "Men you read what this guy says he's going to do, he's serious."

In the next three years, O'Neill investigated al Qaeda's bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, was named special agent in charge of the national security division of the FBI's New York office and delivered a speech warning that terrorists could strike on U.S. soil at any time.

He was awake at 4 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1998, when the encrypted telephone rang at his Peter Cooper Village home. Two U.S. embassies, in Kenya and Tanzania, had been bombed.

He was the first to call the FBI office at 26 Federal Plaza, recalled Detective Pat Pogan.

"We have to get moving on this," O'Neill said. "I know who did this. It's bin Laden."

O'Neill wanted to fly to Africa to lead the investigation. The bombings had killed 247 people. His New York office had the expertise about bin Laden and he was upset when he was told to wait. But he was outraged later that month when President Clinton, three days after his televised admission about Monica Lewinsky, went on TV again to announce, "Today we have struck back."

U.S. Tomahawk missiles were fired at a bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan that intelligence sources identified as a chemical weapons facility.

O'Neill immediately believed that Clinton launched the attack to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal and his impending impeachment.

He and a few people side a tight circle of national. security officials also knew that Clinton was using old intelligence in selecting the targets.

In fact, it was as much as a year out of date, not nearly fresh enough to justify the launch of a surgically precise air assault.

O'Neill wasn't the only major FBI figure who was upset. Amazingly, the White House had failed to notify FBI Director Louis Freeh -- who had just arrived in Kenya. Freeh and Clinton already had a frosty relationship. Hundreds of Freeh's agents were investigate the bombings in two heavily Muslim countries that were loaded with bin Laden sympathizers.

"Freeh was pissed" said Lewis Schiliro, then head of the New York FBI office, who was with Freeh.

"We had agents on the streets, exposed and wearing FBI jackets, and the White House was firing in missiles. What better targets for reprisals than the FBI?'

The missile strikes had no appreciable military impact. But the bombing probe that followed defined the structure of al Qaeda and identified its leaders and key soldiers. Mary Jo White, former U.S. attorney, credits O'Neill.

"I cannot overstate it," she said. "John O'Neill in the investigation of the African embassy bombings created a template for all international terrorism investigations."

0'NEILL and Freeh had great respect for each other, but in some ways they could not have been more different...

George Will continues: There is reason to believe that he is a rapist ("You better get some ice on that," Juanita Broaddrick says he told her concerning her bit lip), and that he bombed a country to distract attention from legal difficulties arising from his glandular life, and that. ... Furthermore, the bargain that he and his wife call a marriage refutes the axiom that opposites attract. Rather, she, as much as he, perhaps even more so, incarnates Clintonism

When Alex kills a woman during a rape, Alex is sent to prison. When clinton rapes women, girls, his country and God knows what else. . . and kills? --- check out those fourscore-plus deaths, please! And don't forget the wag-the-dog, desperately-seeking-a-legacy bombings, or the cold-blooded Ricky Ray Rector execution--- not clinton but society is imprisoned, imprisoned in clinton's besmirched, semen-stained, feckless presidency.

A risible and repulsive result; yet not even the punch line.

While Alex is conditioned in prison with aversion therapy, transmuted into a moral robot who becomes nauseated by the mere thought of sex and violence, bill clinton and his Thought Police, in a perverse reverse aversion, have conditioned society's collective brain into not mere acquiescence but twisted admiration.

In the end, if clinton's arrogant, ruthless, reckless nature is restored to him, it seems the joke will be on all of us, for it will be a victory for infinite victimhood and irresponsibility, for seduction, for violence, for nihilism, for anarchy.

We will have set apart clinton as the hero by making his victims less human than he; we will have allowed clinton to carefully estrange us from his victims so that we can enjoy the rapes and the beatings as much as clinton himself does.

This country has many challenges. We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations. (Applause.) We will confront them with focus and clarity and courage...

Sending Americans into battle is the most profound decision a President can make. The technologies of war have changed; the risks and suffering of war have not. For the brave Americans who bear the risk, no victory is free from sorrow. This nation fights reluctantly, because we know the cost and we dread the days of mourning that always come.

We seek peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes peace must be defended. A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all. If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means -- sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military -- and we will prevail. (Applause.)

PRESIDENT BUSH: Three weeks from now--two weeks from tomorrow, America goes to the polls and you're going to have to decide who you want to lead this country ...

On foreign affairs, some think it's irrelevant. I believe it's not. We're living in an interconnected world...And if a crisis comes up, ask who has the judgment and the experience and, yes, the character to make the right decision?

And, lastly, the other night on character Governor Clinton said it's not the character of the president but the character of the presidency. I couldn't disagree more. Horace Greeley said the only thing that endures is character. And I think it was Justice Black who talked about great nations, like great men, must keep their word.

And so the question is, who will safeguard this nation, who will safeguard our people and our children? I need your support, I ask for your support. And may God bless the United States of America.

He ( O'Neill ) and a few people side a tight circle of national. security officials also knew that Clinton was using old intelligence in selecting the targets.

In fact, it was as much as a year out of date, not nearly fresh enough to justify the launch of a surgically precise air assault.

Horrifying, and even tho we suspected this-to see it in print is awesome.

Wonder how many died in that bombing-in reality, not the standard lap dog press corp clintonization of the facts to protect that scumbag. ( I mean we all understand that if a clinton were president, and the war on Iraq went down as it has, WMD's would have already been found (made up that is), with clinton's willing fabricators playing their gruesome roles to the hilt, probably because those chosen to 'find' the weapons (plants, of course), would consist of folks susceptible to the standard clinton blackmail MO.

Oh, and the fish lens around hitlery's eyeballs---LOL-----purrrrrrrrrrrrrfect!

"In fact, it was as much as a year out of date, not nearly fresh enough to justify the launch of a surgically precise air assault"

Yeah, I picked up on that "out of date intel" too. And .. the dems have the unmitigated gall to accuse Bush of manipulating the intel. These people are so evil .. I'm getting more and more angry by the minute.

9
posted on 08/15/2003 10:43:48 PM PDT
by CyberAnt
( America - "The Greatest Nation on the Face of the Earth")

And what better proof of the rapist clintons' REAL motivation? (BOTH clintons, no doubt, made the decision to bomb to deflect from Lewinsky, Broaddrick and impeachment. In fact, I would be surprised if the bombings weren't entirely the touch of the little stand-by-your-man, hold-down-the-women missus)

"A year out of date."

What better proof that the clintons were holding the intelligence in typical self-serving fashion to use at a time that was most opportune for them and to hell with national security?

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